7 Unconventional Ways to Up Your IT Recruitment Game

Every industry today thrives on technology. To stay competitive in the market, employers are always on the lookout for the best tech talent out there. Although, LinkedIn undoubtedly seems to be the most popular and preferred professional networking platform, recruiters are exploring other forms and techniques to source top notch tech candidates. Breaking away from traditional methods of sourcing candidates via several job boards, the holy trinity of social media – Facebook, Twitter & Instagram remain on top of every recruiter’s to-do list, at least globally if not so much in India.

When it comes to IT recruitment, finding the right candidate that possesses skills required for the job as well as a cultural fit for the company is a challenge for every recruiter. Your need for hiring tech talent is here to stay. Hence, socially-savvy recruiters take to social media and other platforms to recruit top talent. But the idea is not to fetch talent from these typical mediums, but discover unconventional ways to engage with candidates. With the ever-growing millennial population and the demands that follow, organizations are revamping their hiring strategies that attract this generation, because today recruitment is a two-way street.

So apart from the holy trinity of social media, there are several avenues to source some great candidates out there and build an excellent tech network.

7 Creative Ways to get your Recruitment Game On

GitHub

GitHub is the place where you will find most of the tech crowd. It is a hosting service where developers and coders share open-source projects they are working on and a project management platform. GitHub allows recruiters to access several profiles that give information about current employer, location, email address, their work portfolio, number of followers and repositories (where they store their code). All recruiters need to do is create an account on GitHub and use the search engine to search up to three parameters, i.e, language (programming) location and followers.

(Image source:belong.co)

Hackathons

Organizing hackathons is another great way to attract some good tech heads. Hackathons are taking over traditional career fairs and have recorded maximum participation from the tech population, as it is an intriguing and exciting platform to code, compete, build a professional network, hone your skills and land a job. Hackathons can be organized in multiple ways such as virtual, interactive or industry-specific in nature. Recruiters can source and interact with potential candidates that possess a variety of technical skill sets. An internal hackathon also helps you identify top performers or potential fits within the organization.

(Image source:eduinfo.asia)

Meetup.com

As the name itself suggests, meetup is the largest network of local groups. To be more precise – over 15 million members, 140,000+ groups in 196 countries. Meetup is a great platform to connect with individuals in multiple countries, you can sign up for free and search keywords such as engineers, developers, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby etc and unlock access to several qualified candidates. Especially hiring for overseas clients this proves to be an effective place to grow the tech network. You may directly contact people on Meetup with the email option or choose to connect with them on LinkedIn.

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Stack Exchange

Stack Exchange is network that consists of 133 FAQ communities for developers to share, discuss and build knowledge about programming. Stack Overflow being the largest and most reliable online community has more than 50 million registered developers. Recruiters can reach an enormous pool of tech talent and identify the right skill set depending on the location for which you are hiring. Along with recruiting, Stack Overflow is also a great platform to learn about the latest technologies, programming trends and connect with the developers all over the world. The easiest way to source candidates on Stack Exchange is an x-ray search on Google like the one below.

(Image source:belong.co)

Dribbble

Dribble is the place to engage and connect with creative UX/UI designers. Recruiters have access to a variety of profiles to source designers. Dribbble allows recruiters to identify talent, examine portfolios and styles and pick candidates that are suited for the job.

(Image source:lever.co)

Kaggle

Kaggle conducts competitions that suit your organization’s data science needs. It boasts of a large community of data scientists who participate in these competitions, allowing recruiters or employers to pick candidates directly based on their needs. You can advertise job opportunities, start a discussion, engage in forums and screen resumes submitted by job seekers.

(Image source:lever.co)

Quora

Through Quora you can search for discussions based on your talent needs. You can connect with experts and identify the right fit for the job. First off, recruiters would have to create an interesting profile that is informative of interests, education, location, work experience etc to attract them to connect with you.

(Image source:lever.co)

What have we learnt?

With recruitment practices evolving rapidly, the adoption of these methods differ from place to place. India, being a tech hub and a honey pot for global tech companies, our recruitment tactics yet need to evolve quicker. Using unconventional recruitment techniques, you could discover a gold mine of tech talent right at your disposal quickly and easily. The idea is to think outside the box and explore various avenues to find people.